Baton Rouge shooting

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Perhaps "fabricated" was not the right word. What I meant was that the significance of the numbers are greatly exaggerated. If Black Lives Matter believes their name, why are they so concerned about only around 100 unarmed blacks killed per year by police (many of those still being justified shootings or at the very least a gray area), when the leading cause of death for young black men is homicide, largely committed by other black men? The number is astronomically higher than the number of blacks being killed by police. Yet that fact doesn't get so much as a footnote in their movement.

Apparently black lives only matter if those lives can be used to make white cops look racist.

You're not very good at this. You know people can believe in more than one thing at once and people can belong to mare than one advocacy groups. There are plenty of people talking about both of these issues.

Come up with some better talking points or just be quiet already. You just keep repeating yourself to different people who all keep slapping your faulty logic down.

So, because criminals murder people, we shouldn't care how the police behave? I don't know why we hold police to a higher standard than criminals.

Further, it's not as though criminal homicides aren't also a concern, but at least some of them are also a symptom of distrust of the police. If you believe the police aren't going to make solving your loved ones murder a priority, you might prefer to have it dealt with by people who will. When police are seen as causing further trouble, doing little to protect people who assist and cooperate with them, more concerned with petty revenue collection than solving serious crimes, targeting your neighbours for harassment, behaving like an occupying outside force and being corrupted by connections to crime, all these things undermine community respect for them. That's not to suggest that all of these problems exist within every single police force, but instead that enough of them either do or did and that police in many areas are either disinterested in or outright hostile to changing the way they interact with the communities they're expected to serve and protect.

It's not entirely because of bad cops, but they're a factor.
It's not entirely because of bad policing culture, but that's a factor.
It's not entirely because the media reports on problems that they sometimes prefer to ignore, but that's a factor.
It's not entirely a reasonable reaction all the time, but it's an understandable reaction.

Some forces are making efforts to improve things, that doesn't mean that others don't treat any criticism as hostile.
Many officers are genuinely interested in trying to improve things.
BLM is also interested in improving things.
That they don't agree on how to achieve that isn't surprising, but that doesn't mean that BLM and various police services are inherently bound in an antagonistic relationship, and they tend to have the best results towards those goals while working together.

Having fun beating up that straw man? I never said they couldn't talk about both. I'm saying that the majority of BLM is not, because that is not their message. Look on their website. They call bringing up black-on-black crime a diversion tactic to distract from the "real" problem of systemic racism, and literally say they refuse to hold the black community at all responsible for the actions of those in the black community.

They always find a way to blame all their problems on white racism; it's never a something that black people should take responsibility for. So yes, they talk about it, but only when it allows them to bring the conversation back to systemic racism. They don't talk about solutions.

By the way, I'm not saying literally ALL BLM is like this. Everyone keeps assuming that. No, that's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying the majority, or at least a large portion that gets more media coverage, is.

I'm not saying ignore the police or any other problem, I'm just saying one seems like much more of a priority to me. Reducing black crime would surely reduce the number of run-ins with the cops, thus reducing the likelihood of unjustified or justified shootings across the board, rather than just trying to tell police not to shoot black people when sometimes they have to.

The main problems in the black community, at least in my opinion, seem to be poverty, poor education, and crime. These things work from within the black community, and are like a cancer. Police brutality, lack of police accountability and the criminal justice system as a whole are also problems, but to me it seems much more logical to start by building up the black community from within, rather than trying to tear down systemic problems that affect everyone, not just blacks, and ultimately will not solve the more immediate problems I am referring to.

Put simply, I think there should be more focus on the internal issues the black community faces, as that seems to be something they have more direct control over and would ultimately do more good for them, given that it is their community they are trying to help. Whereas systemic issues involve fighting an external force.

If the oppression was still on the level that it was fifty years ago I could understand. But systemic racism against blacks is gone. There are individual people within the systems who still hold racist beliefs and who abuse their power, but that is a different kind of issue and cannot simply be legislated away.

I just see a lot of efforts to protest and fight and get angry, rather than efforts to support, work together and build things up, and I think the latter approach would be much more effective.

L_Holmes,

BLM is focused on the causes of the problem more than the symptoms. Because if the cause is solved (which in this case is the remaining racism left in our government) then the symptoms will naturally go away.

Again this has all been explained to you ad nauseam, but you just ignore it or pretend that you refuted it. Either that or you just misunderstand the counter arguments.

You should probably not try to tell an entire community what they should do about their problems. It's very judgmental and rude.

Jeez, sorry I tried to explain my views. I said it was my opinion. Apparently that's judgemental and rude.

I don't see it the way you do. I see them focusing more on symptoms, not underlying causes. Call me crazy (or racist), but I'm pretty sure the reason black people get shot and killed by police a lot (still less than the number of whites shot and killed by police btw) is because they are 5 times more likely to commit violent crimes, not because tons of cops are racist.

And why is that? For a whole number of factors, of course, which include poverty, past systemic racism, culture, education etc. I'm not saying literally blame them for everything and ignore unfair treatment, but there has to be a point where they accept some responsibility for their own wellbeing. I think they'd garner more support if they did.

But BLM is encouraging the opposite: blame external oppression for everything and take no responsibility. Even when the problem is black-on-black crime, it still must somehow be all because of white people. That's how they operate, and it will only cause harm to the people they want to help.

I don't care if that seems judgemental to you. It's what I think. And unlike many people today, I don't think black people should be treated as if they can't handle criticism, nor do I think that we should feel sorry for them, nor do I think that we should blame all their problems on other groups of people. That is subconscious racism, posing as virtuous behaviour.

L_Holmes,

Considering how badly you mangle your interpretation of the responses you're getting it doesn't surprise me at all that you also misunderstand the message of BLM. And all of the things you keep imploring this group to do are things they are doing and have done. You're stuck on this idea that BLM is a toxic movement and nothing me or anyone else says will shake you of that notion.

And since you're so positive systematic racism is just gone I assume you can show me evidence to support your claim?

Show me examples of them doing that stuff then, and I'll believe you. Maybe the media just doesn't report on it, but unless you actually have good examples I'm not inclined to believe you.

As far as systemic racism, the burden of proof is on you to prove it exists, since that is the positive claim. Me not believing that in the absence of evidence doesn't mean I now have to disprove its existence. That's not how it works.

No that's not how it works at all. You made the claim that systematic racism is gone, so the burden is on you to provide evidence. Besides that, evidence has been provided, you just ignored it.

If you only had to prove a positive claim than I can claim that I'm not from earth and the burden of proof would be on you to prove me wrong. It doesn't make any sense.

You mean 'they're all liars; their experience is invalid because I don't see it' isn't a reasonable rebuttal? Next you'll suggest BLM isn't a racist conspiracy to get white cops murdered and instead exist to highlight a specific social issue.



You should let everyone know because your experience doesn't seem to be in sync with what many others describe experiencing. Somehow I feel more inclined to believe countless, consistent descriptions of what individuals in a demographic experience vs. what one person states that's entirely at odds with those experiences, especially if they're not within the group describing their experiences. Call me nuts, but your take on their experience is less valuable than their own take - just like I wouldn't accept them invalidating your experiences as a person with autism unless they also had autism (and in that case the two wouldn't cancel each other out, they'd merely be in conflict).



They might not be outspoken members of white supremacist organizations out hunting with the specific intention of targeting black individuals, but if an encounter with people in some demographics spooks you so much you feel the need to open fire on them when nearly identical encounters with other people who fall into other demographic categories doesn't provoke that response, one is almost certainly a racist who's unsuitable to serve as an officer whether they accept it and recognize it or not.

So according to you I'm supposed to disprove the claim that systemic racism against black people still exists, when I've seen no evidence presented for it? I'm not going to waste my time disproving something when nobody has presented any evidence for its existence in the first place.

BLM is making the claim that it does exist, meaning the burden of proof is on them, and that is what I'm responding to when I say it doesn't exist.

I've seen no evidence that it does exist, and considering things like anti-discrimination laws, societal attitudes towards racism, and the fact that there are plenty of black people who hold institutional power in this country at all levels, including the president, it makes it quite unlikely to be the case.

If you're so sure that it exists, it should be really easy to provide even just one or two good examples of it. But I can't go through and prove that every single last system does not have racism. That makes no sense.

You've seen the evidence you just ignored it. And like I said, you're not very good at this.

That's a straw man. I don't think they are all liars and I never said I did. I think that they believe misinformation and lies from the media and from the leaders of their movement.

It doesn't matter how much they believe it, or how many of them believe it, if there is no evidence that their belief is actually fact then it makes no sense to treat it as such. You still have provided no evidence and neither have they, nor has anyone shown that it's a majority of blacks that agree. BLM points at the shootings as prime examples, but I've already shown why they shouldn't be using those as evidence.

In the absence of any other evidence it's safe to say it doesn't exist, at least until substantial evidence for it is found.

Saying he ignored it implies it was intentional. He didn't interpret it that way or failed to notice it or disregarded it as irrelevant to his existence or wilfully chose to ignore it; but I wouldn't assume him choosing to ignore it is the only explanation.

I otherwise largely agree, other than assuming only a 'bad faith' explanation is reasonable. I might just be being fussy over wording though.

And you claim to know what I've seen? That's impossible. You certainly haven't provided any evidence, so I'm not sure how you would know if I've seen any unless you can read minds through the internet.

I'm not good at what? Agreeing unconditionally with unsupported BS? Yeah, that is pretty accurate.

If you just provide me a link to something, anything, that really shows the evidence, I'm not just going to flat out deny it. I would admit I was wrong.